The GDPR treats the citizens of the European Union, whom it calls “natural persons,” as also being “data subjects”—that is, people who generate personally identifiable data. In the US, data is usually regarded as the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of the person it represents, which allows it to treat our data subjecthood as deserving of civil liberties protections.
The GDPR is undoubtedly a major legal advance, but even its transnationalism is too parochiaclass="underline" the Internet is global. Our natural personhood will never be legally synonymous with our data subjecthood, not least because the former lives in one place at a time while the latter lives in many places simultaneously.
Today, no matter who you are, or where you are, bodily, physically, you are also elsewhere, abroad—multiple selves wandering along the signal paths, with no country to call your own, and yet beholden to the laws of every country through which you pass. The records of a life lived in Geneva dwell in the Beltway. The photos of a wedding in Tokyo are on a honeymoon in Sydney. The videos of a funeral in Varanasi are up on Apple’s iCloud, which is partially located in my home state of North Carolina and partially scattered across the partner servers of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, throughout the EU, UK, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China.
Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.
We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies detect us in utero, and our data will continue to proliferate even after we die. Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep, comprise just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives—most of it unconsciously, or without our consent—by business and government surveillance. We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.
Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new generation. Not yet born on 9/11, they have spent their entire lives under the omnipresent specter of this surveillance. These young people who have known no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s their political creativity and technological ingenuity that give me hope.
Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped too—each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.
Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control.
Of course, all of the above has already happened.
EXILE: NOT A day has passed since August 1, 2013, in which I don’t recall that “exile” was what my teenage self used to call getting booted off-line. The Wi-Fi died? Exile. I’m out of signal range? Exile. The self who used to say that now seems so young to me. He seems so distant.
When people ask me what my life is like now, I tend to answer that it’s a lot like theirs in that I spend a lot of time in front of the computer—reading, writing, interacting. From what the press likes to describe as an “undisclosed location”—which is really just whatever two-bedroom apartment in Moscow I happen to be renting—I beam myself onto stages around the world, speaking about the protection of civil liberties in the digital age to audiences of students, scholars, lawmakers, and technologists.
Some days I take virtual meetings with my fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, or talk with my European legal team, led by Wolfgang Kaleck, at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Other days, I just pick up some Burger King—I know where my loyalties lie—and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use credit cards. One fixture of my existence is my daily check-in with my American lawyer, confidant, and all-around consigliere Ben Wizner at the ACLU, who has been my guide to the world as it is and puts up with my musings about the world as it should be.
That’s my life. It got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of 2014, when Lindsay came to visit—the first time I’d seen her since Hawaii. I tried not to expect too much, because I knew I didn’t deserve the chance; the only thing I deserved was a slap in the face. But when I opened the door, she placed her hand on my cheek and I told her I loved her.
“Hush,” she said, “I know.”
We held each other in silence, each breath like a pledge to make up for lost time.
From that moment, my world was hers. Previously, I’d been content to hang around indoors—indeed, that was my preference before I was in Russia—but Lindsay was insistent: she’d never been to Russia and now we were going to be tourists together.
My Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who helped me get asylum in the country—he was the only lawyer who had the foresight to show up at the airport with a translator—is a cultured and resourceful man, and he proved as adept at obtaining last-minute tickets to the opera as he is at navigating my legal issues. He helped arrange two box seats at the Bolshoi Theater, so Lindsay and I got dressed and went, though I have to admit I was wary. There were so many people, all packed so tightly into a hall. Lindsay could sense my growing unease. As the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, she leaned over, nudged me in the ribs, and whispered, “None of these people are here for you. They’re here for this.”